The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

METAPHORS OF TRANSFORMATION with RALPH METZNER, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our program
tonight is going to deal with "Metaphors of Transformation," and my guest,
Dr. Ralph Metzner, is a professor and academic dean of the California Institute
of Integral Studies, and the author of several books, including Maps
of Consciousness and Opening to Inner Light. Ralph is also extremely
well known for having co-authored The Psychedelic Experience back
in the 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Welcome, Ralph. It's
a pleasure to have you here.

RALPH METZNER, Ph.D.: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

MISHLOVE: You've gone through quite a journey of transformation
yourself since the psychedelic years. In your most recent book, what you've
attempted to do is to look at the various metaphors in spiritual traditions
and other traditions that deal with human transformations, and show how
they do apply, and how they're useful road maps, so to speak. What is a
metaphor, really, and why would a metaphor be important or useful?

METZNER: Well, before saying that, I'd like to say something
about this concept of transformation of consciousness, which actually on
a personal note started for me with the research that we did with psychedelics
in the sixties, because it was at that time for me -- and I'm not saying
that this is necessarily so for others, although it was for some -- a crucial
turning point. And the turning point in consciousness, I think, could be
described something like this: that it was like for the first time, at
the time of my first experience with psychedelics, I realized that the
external world, the reality that we perceive, isn't just something that
is unalterably given, but rather depends to a very great degree on things
going on within myself -- namely my attitudes, my choices, my values, my
feelings, and my beliefs. And that experience started me off on a quest
which I've been on ever since, which is to discover, really, the basic
underlying principles and the methods by means of which such transformations
of consciousness occur, and also how they can be applied in healing, in
psychotherapy, in education, in learning, and in personal and spiritual
growth.

MISHLOVE: At some point in this process the notion of
metaphors became very important to you.

METZNER: Right. So what I realized, after studying the
very many different systems of consciousness transformation, the ancient
spiritual traditions of East and West, and also studying the accounts of
people today who undergo a transformative experience, whether that be in
psychotherapy or spontaneously in their everyday life, is that certain
consistencies emerge. And it seemed to me, when I first started noticing
it, that although there may be hundreds of specific techniques -- techniques
including breath and meditation and yoga and energy and light and sound
and drugs and many other methods, psychotherapy --

MISHLOVE: Chanting, prayer --

METZNER: Chanting -- I mean, they go on and on and on

-- shamanic methods, and so forth. And you find the many
different methods used in the various traditions, and also in contemporary
work -- that people are rediscovering many of these ancient methods. But
there seem to be only a dozen or so basic patterns of the transformation
itself, how it is experienced -- the phenomenology of it, one would say.
And these patterns are described in the form of metaphors. And they're
described as metaphors because ordinary language has a very hard time dealing
with these states and these transformations, because by definition they
are a transformation out of the ordinary into the non-ordinary, the extraordinary,
the supernatural, the miraculous, as it's sometimes called, the magical,
the transcendent, the sacred, the mysterious -- many different terms that
point to other kinds of realms of being, or other kinds of realms of consciousness
that lie outside of the framework of our usual view of reality.

MISHLOVE: Now, when you say that metaphors are so important,
right away I think, well, metaphors, they come from poetry; they come from
literature, drama. What you're basically saying to me is that human change
is like a story unfolding, say, as opposed to the workings of a mechanism.
Not like clockwork --

METZNER: Yes, that's very good. That's right.

MISHLOVE: -- where obviously they go through prescribed
mechanical changes. We wouldn't need metaphors for that.

METZNER: Yes. See, to call it clockwork, to liken it to
that, or to a machine, or to a computer --

MISHLOVE: That is a metaphor itself.

METZNER: That is a metaphor, and it's a mechanical metaphor.
And I, like many people, and like yourself, intuitively believe that some
metaphors are better than others. I generally prefer organic metaphors
to mechanical metaphors, because with organic metaphors you're comparing
the process -- with metaphor you're always comparing one process to something
else. You're always saying, this process A is like this process over there,
B. And if you can use something in nature as a symbol or metaphor -- and
a symbol is very similar, like a metaphor --

MISHLOVE: What's the difference between a symbol and a
metaphor?

METZNER: Well, to me, actually, the difference is kind
of simple. In other words, a symbol is more like a thing, a thing or an
object. Metaphor to me is more descriptive of a process. So I could say
that the path is a very common symbol of spiritual growth. Traveling on
the path, going on a journey from the beginning to the end of the path,
would be a metaphor for a kind of process in life, of changing and walking
and moving along. Similarly, say, the tree, the tree of life, is a powerful
and ancient and well known universal symbol for life and growth and reproduction
and fruitfulness and so forth. But the growth of the tree, from the seed
to the fully expanded tree, would be again a metaphor.

MISHLOVE: So metaphors involve movement.

METZNER: Movement and change over time. But with symbols
and metaphors, I follow really a Jungian approach, which sees some of these
structures as being archetypal. This was Jung's term for psychic structures
that are common to the entire human species, across all cultures. Different
cultures have different forms of it, different clothing of it, different
vehicles for it, or languages or words for it, but the underlying pattern
is the same. For example, the archetype of the great mother is one that's
often spoken of -- the great goddess, the earth mother, something like
that. It has different names. In China it's Kuan Yin; in India it was Kali
or Parvati; in Greece, Demeter; in the Christian tradition, the Madonna
or Mary; and so forth. In the Jewish tradition, the shekinah. But the underlying
principle of the mother -- the cosmic mother, the world mother -- is the
same. So this is what I began to notice -- that there are, when you look
at the realm of human transformation, the unfolding of human potential,
a number of these core metaphors that can be found in different clothing
in the different cultures, and it's very interesting to study them, because
they can be very helpful to somebody who's undergoing a process, who may
in some way feel that they're lost or confused, or don't know what's happening
to them, which can very often happen.

MISHLOVE: You called your book Opening to the Light.

METZNER: Opening to Inner Light. The subtitle is "The
Transformation of Human Nature and Consciousness." And I wanted to put
in that it's not only the transformation of consciousness, but it's also
the transformation of nature, including the physical nature. Because the
ultimate transformation of consciousness involves transformation of the
body, the mind, the spirit, the soul, the feelings -- including the body,
including the body chemistry. It sounds more outrageous than it is, because
when you think about somebody who gets healed, or heals themselves, even
better, or has a spontaneous remission of some tumor or some disease or
some illness process, that's a psychophysical transformation, including
somatic transformation of a very high order, that that person has unconsciously,
kind of magically, produced in themselves.

MISHLOVE: And the key metaphor, I should think, for physical
transformation, would be the caterpillar to butterfly.

METZNER: Caterpillar to butterfly is in fact one of the
oldest kind of poetic ones. I wanted to actually come back to something
you asked about earlier, which is we think of metaphors as being the language
of poetry, of literature. And this is true. This was for me something of
a revelation a few years ago, when I came across the work of some Berkeley
philosophers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who wrote a very important
book, I think, called Metaphors We Live By, where they point out that ordinary
language, including therefore ordinary thought, is much more pervasively
metaphorical than we ordinarily think -- that it's shot through with implicit
metaphors, metaphors that we don't recognize as such. And they make a point
of sort of uncovering these, and showing that in actual fact, when you
get right down to it, our language and our thinking itself, probably, is
maybe up to eighty or ninety percent metaphorical.

MISHLOVE: Especially American speech. We have so much
vernacular.

METZNER: Right. Although I would say, actually, that even
beyond that -- I've given talks and so forth in Europe in other languages,
where I find the same metaphors exist, but obviously in different words,
and sometimes slightly different images. But the underlying structure is
the same.

MISHLOVE: So you're saying it goes beyond just being something
as remote, say, as poetry or literature. It's implicit in our language.

METZNER: That's right. It's implicit in our language.
A good example of an implicit metaphor that most people don't realize is
one, that they mention as an example, is the notion that money is somehow
liquid. You know, we talk about cash flow; we talk about liquid assets,
liquidating, and so forth. It's the idea that money is somehow like a liquid,
it flows like a liquid. Now why that should be so is anybody's guess, but
it has that structure. Let me give you an example of a metaphor from the
realm of transformation of consciousness. You mentioned the caterpillar
to butterfly -- ancient. You find it used by Chuang Tzu in the fourth century
B.C. in China, a Taoist philosopher.

MISHLOVE: "I dreamt that I was a butterfly; or was I a
butterfly dreaming I was Chuang Tzu?"

METZNER: Right. Exactly. So the other notion is that you're
comparing the larval stage, the caterpillar stage, to our ordinary consciousness.
So the metaphor is a teaching metaphor, and it's telling us that after
the larva stage, we think it's the end -- that after we have this stage,
in which we are now this ordinary part of existence, we think we die, and
then it's all over. And actually, Richard Bach has this great line in one
of his books where he says, "What the caterpillar calls the end of the
world, the rest of the world calls butterfly." So from the caterpillar's
or the larval point of view, we can't see beyond our current framework.
This is where we have grown up, this is how we were conditioned to see
and experience the world -- consensual reality, some people call it. And
yet once we can move into the butterfly stage, it's like we are able to
move in more dimensions. The butterfly can fly as well as crawl. And so
it can look back then on the larval stage, as it were, and see what was
going on there. So we might say that the language, the stories of the mystics,
and the mythic and poetic and artistic stories of transformation of consciousness
that people have written and painted, are like the messages from the butterfly
back to --

MISHLOVE: Back to the caterpillar.

METZNER: Back to the caterpillar that they once all were,
in the form of, "We can't really tell you exactly how it's going to be,
but it's sort of like this," you know, or it's like this. The whole New
Testament -- you think of the New Testament, the Gospels, one parable after
another. Jesus says, "The kingdom of Heaven is like a man going to a far
country." The kindgom of Heaven is Jesus' metaphor for a state of consciousness,
a state of being, a kind of blessed state of being, of enlightenment.

MISHLOVE: It may sound very imprecise, or very unscientific,
but what you're saying is that it's better than science.

METZNER: Absolutely better, because it speaks more to
people. It speaks to where they are. It speaks to their actual experience.
One metaphor that I talk about in the book is the notion of the journey.
This is something that everybody can relate to without exception. For one
thing, people very readily experience their own life as a journey. It starts
at birth --

MISHLOVE: Crossing the great water.

METZNER: And then death is seen as another kind of journey.
And then, you might say, that the transformation process, the mystical
or spiritual transpersonal growth process, is like a journey that branches
off from the main journey of life. It's not a journey that everybody takes,
but those who are called to take it -- this was what Joseph Campbell wrote
about in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the hero myth. In many
people's lives there comes a certain turning point where they feel, he
called it, the call to adventure, like the call to leave the everyday world,
the common ordinary world of family and social reality, and go in quest
of something. They're not even quite sure what it is, but they're somehow
motivated. This whole question of what starts somebody off on the transformation
quest or process is a very interesting one.

MISHLOVE: Let's talk about it in concrete terms. You have
clients. You deal with students at the California Institute of Integral
Studies.

METZNER: We've collected a lot of literature.

MISHLOVE: When they go through their changes, do they
turn from caterpillars to butterflies? Do they take the hero's journey?

METZNER: Well, that would be taking the metaphor too literally,
you see. You can't take the metaphor too literally. But, as an example,
yes. I have a friend who was a student at the Institute, whom I quote.
She wrote a book about her experiences when she went on a journey. There
she was experiencing the metaphorical journey, which is a journey of self
transformation, while at the same time going on an external journey. She
didn't really know why she went on an external journey. She just made this
plan. She was going through a lot of changes in her life. She was getting
divorced from a nine-year marriage; she was leaving her job. She decided
to take a journey to Nepal. So as she started making her preparations to
go on a journey to Nepal, she read Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with
a Thousand Faces. She started reading about the call to adventure. She
started having dreams of journeying in these magical places.

MISHLOVE: I might mention parenthetically that that book
seems to be very influential in Hollywood these days. Every Hollywood writer
and director wants to know about The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

METZNER: Well, it deeply influenced George Lucas in the
Star Wars series. And so the outer journey and the inner journey can sometimes
be, and often are, correlated. But not necessarily. I mean, many people
can go on an outer journey and not have any kind of transformative experience
at all. If you go like a tourist, you just go and come back, and it was
just a summer tourist vacation. Or also it can be possible to go on the
profound inner journey of transformation and never leave your house. That's
what's called the monastic tradition or the tradition of retreat or hermitage,
where somebody goes into a social retreat, isolation, deliberately -- in
the wilderness, as among certain shamanic cultures, or in a monastery environment.
And then at that place really goes on this journey of inward meditation,
contemplation, inward exploring of different states of consciousness.

MISHLOVE: The journey is an easy one to relate to. We
all do go on journeys, and it's a nice idea of transformation. You can
have a short journey, you can have a long journey, you can have a perilous
journey. But the caterpillar-to-butterfly, let's come back to that. When
does it apply?

METZNER: Well, the caterpillar-to-butterfly is actually,
I think, more of a poetic one. The more general one that I would count
that under is the notion of going from captivity to liberation. See, you
would think of the caterpillar as being liberated out of this containing
cocoon, as it were. And that metaphor, of going from a state of captivity
to a liberation, has many variations, such as being trapped in a dungeon
of some kind, and having to escape from prison, or having to break out
of some kind of confinement. Wilhelm Reich's idea of character armor, I
think, fits in that pattern, because the armoring, which is this muscular
tension pattern that one develops as a result of life experiences and defensiveness,
can end up as being a very kind of constricting armor that then almost
sticks to you, and then you no longer have the freedom of movement. We're
talking of freedom of expression and movement that would be more emotional.
We can't take it too literally.

MISHLOVE: You know, it's interesting that you mention
this, because that metaphor of captivity to liberation is one of the basic
metaphors of the Jewish people, where they were slaves in Egypt. And it's
as if since they freed themselves thousands of years ago from slavery in
Egypt, for all of their ups and downs and faults, there's been no stopping
these people.

METZNER: That's right. And so they don't want to get into
another one. I think that's true. The application of these metaphors on
the collective basis is something that I didn't deal with in my book at
all, because I wanted to focus it just on the individual. But it is of
course something that's of very great interest to me, and I now do -- I
see the transformation patterns actually as occurring on four levels. In
other words, the level of the individual; and the next level up, so to
speak, would be the family or group or also work group, organizational
kind of thing. And there are many people working in this field, as you
know -- you know, how do you transform a family system, how do you transform
an organization, a group of people? The next level up beyond that would
be the social or cultural or nation or larger collective grouping. And
there of course it's a vastly more complex factor, with an infinitely greater
number of factors interreacting. And the fourth level is the total system,
the planet as a whole; not only people, but the entire natural system,
the entire ecosystem, is undergoing changes of transformation all the time.

MISHLOVE: I think your former colleague Timothy Leary
used the caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor in referring to space flight,
and our leaving of the planet.

METZNER: Yes, right. That's another application of it.
One of the interesting things about these metaphors is that they have multiple
meanings, and their meaning is not exhausted by just saying one equivalent,
this means that. Symbols are like that. That's one of the great things
that Jung really discovered about the language of the unconscious -- that
it has these multiple meanings. And it's definitely misleading to take
it as only meaning one thing. Its very power comes from the fact that it
branches out into many different areas.

MISHLOVE: And one's skill, then, as a therapist must be
to intuit what is the metaphor that's active in a given situation.

METZNER: Right. What does the person resonate to? So my
experience with these metaphors that I've written about

-- and I've quoted from people in their accounts -- is
that people often will resonate to one or the other. And it has their own
particular form. I think there is, just parenthetically, one very specific
possible meaning of the caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation, which
I actually haven't heard spoken of very much, but it's one that makes a
lot of intuitive sense for me. And that's to think of the birth process
itself as being that transition.

MISHLOVE: Oh yes.

METZNER: Because when you think of the nine months that
we spend in the womb, we're living in an environment very much like a larva
in a cocoon. The womb is like a cocoon. It completely surrounds you, and
you're all folded up in it, and you basically can't move. I mean, you can
take in and excrete, but you can't move. And the big difference from in
the womb to out of the womb is being able to breathe, and being able to
move in more dimensions, and go through the air, just like the moth or
the butterfly after it comes out of the larva.

MISHLOVE: And closely related, then, to the caterpillar-butterfly
is the death-rebirth.

METZNER: Death-rebirth is a very ancient one.

MISHLOVE: Very archetypal.

METZNER: Right, very archetypal. They all are archetypal;
and interestingly enough, I think, books have been written about each one
of those metaphors, and death-rebirth, of course.

MISHLOVE: For the benefit of some of our viewers, can
you define the term archetypal?

METZNER: Well, this is what I was trying to say earlier.
I follow really Jung's idea. Another term for it that's sometimes used
is deep structures. The linguists, people like Chomsky, talk about deep
cognitive structures, and contrast these with surface structures. So Jung
also said the archetype itself is deep in the psyche, and it's shared by
the entire human species. And I think he in his later work would say even
that it's shared by nature. In other words, these patterns are somehow
inherent in the world. Numbers, for example -- the number three is an archetype,
and it's inherent in nature. It's not just psychological. But then the
culture and the individual put a sort of clothing on it, a symbolic form
or a metaphoric form, and that varies from culture to culture, so the image

that you have in your mind, or the thought that you have,
is always that culturally, individually specific thing.

MISHLOVE: And the death-rebirth archetype, or metaphor,
for example, certainly is very strong in Christian culture

-- the death and rebirth of Christ.

METZNER. Very much so. Let's take a look at that metaphor
specifically. What it says is that the process of transformation of personality,
which is what we're talking about here -- going from a personality in one
way to another kind of personality change -- is like the process of dying
and then being reborn. Something dies. What dies is the old self, the old
way of being, the old way of relating or being in the world. And what is
then reborn after a period of turmoil and confusion, longer or shorter,
is a new way of being, a new self. That's a metaphor, very clearly, and
it's a very powerful one, it's a very charged one. It also incidentally
helps explain why there is so often so much fear around the process of
changing or transformation, because anytime you change from something known
to something unknown, there's going to be fear.

MISHLOVE: One can even look at the example of Christ on
the cross, and that moment right before death: "Oh God, why has Thou forsaken
me?" And then comes the rebirth.

METZNER: Yes, that's right. There comes the rebirth. And
you could say, and it sometimes has occurred to me -- and I know this is
a simplification -- but if you look at the history of Christianity from
its sort of orthodox formulation point of view -- not so much the mystics,
who are another story, but the orthodox, conventional formula of it --
there's a tremendous emphasis on the crucifixion, and much less emphasis
on the second half of that story, which is the resurrection, which in the
original story is equally as powerful. But we don't have that as a symbol.
What Christianity has chosen as its symbol is the crucified Christ on the
cross.

MISHLOVE: Rather than the risen.

METZNER: Rather than the risen Christ. And that may have
something to do with the tendency that Christianity has had to get locked
up and lost in world-negating, tremendously pessimistic, tragic kinds of
philosophies and world views that really emphasize suffering and sinfulness
and death, while the resurrection is there in the background, but it's
not really -- it's almost as if he didn't quite believe it.

MISHLOVE: But surely you have seen examples of real rebirth
in people -- in psychedelic experience and in therapy and in education.

METZNER: In fact, The Psychedelic Experience, that book
was based on the notion of death-rebirth metaphor --

MISHLOVE: Through the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

METZNER: -- because it's based on the Tibetan Book of
the Dead, which is a book that describes, according to the Tibetan Buddhist
lamas who studied these things at great depth and in great detail, the
phenomenology of what actually happens to you after you die.

MISHLOVE: Step by step.

METZNER: Step by step. You go through these various stages,
depending on your karma, and you have these visions and hallucinations,
and you have these tests and challenges, and then you get reborn in one
of the six worlds. Well, so we said, at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley
-- actually, it was his idea -- that the psychedelic trip can in many cases
be very aptly described, and experienced very aptly by the people undergoing
it, as a kind of death followed by rebirth. Your old ego, your old self,
your old personality dies in some way. You give it up, you surrender it.
You don't die physically, of course, but you feel like you're dying, since
you have to give up these things. And then you get reborn in some way.
Now again, it's not limited to psychedelics by any means, because people
very often have that kind of an experience.

MISHLOVE: My own feeling is that that is the most powerful
metaphor -- the death-to-rebirth.

METZNER: Right. And it's also, interestingly enough, the
most common trigger. If you look at what triggers somebody, what starts
somebody off on the process of going on a transformation, in my experience
-- and I don't have statistics to prove this -- but the single most common
trigger or catalyst is a death experience, is the nearness to death.

MISHLOVE: Ralph, we're out of time right now. We're going
to have to kill it.

METZNER: Oh, kill it right there. All right.

MISHLOVE: Thank you very much for being with me. It's
been a pleasure.

METZNER: Likewise.

MISHLOVE: And I hope you experience a rebirth yourself
after this death.